LOCAL businesses and government on the North Shore are eager to start moving forward with electric vehicles - they just need automakers to catch up.
In years past, one of the main obstacles to bringing a fully electric vehicle to market was "range anxiety" - buyers' concern that they would run out of juice if they strayed too far from their charging station at home.
But charging stations have started to appear. There are three in the City of Vancouver and, last summer, North Vancouver's Angel Restoration took the bold step of installing one in front of their offices and offering it to the public free of charge.
"The rationale behind it," said vice-president Cam McLeod, "was that having a large fleet of vehicles, we consume a large amount of fuel to get around. We drive hundreds of kilometres going to various job sites. If we were able to build a business case to get even one electric vehicle, we'd be on the road to influencing other companies and making people think about what they might need in the future."
Trouble is, eight months later McLeod can't find any electric vehicles he can justify from a business perspective.
"Logistically, none of the electric vehicle solutions have made sense for our applications," he said. "Me and my brother were looking at an electric motorbike that we would share and do local trips around to job sites and do estimates. But we haven't built a business case for it."
The McLeods won high praise from the District of North Vancouver council when they installed the station, but district officials say they too haven't seen any road vehicles that are cost effective with tax dollars, even with the savings in fuel.
McLeod estimates that four or five cars have used his charging station over the past eight months.
The only mass-produced fully electric vehicle currently available is the Nissan Leaf, which starts at slightly more than $40,000. A plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt carries a similar price tag. By comparison, a Smart Car fortwo starts at slightly more than $12,000. The City of North Vancouver does own one Volt as a pool car.
According to ICBC, there are 30 electric road vehicles registered in the Lower Mainland, none of them on the North Shore. Both the City of North Vancouver and the District of West Vancouver do however own small, non-street-legal electric utility vehicles for use in parks and the cemetery.
